United States: Getting sick with a virus can be really frustrating, especially if it happens right when you’re going on vacation. Who wants to be stuck in a hotel bed when there are exciting places to explore?
Researchers believe there might be a reason why we get sick at the worst times, like when we’re traveling. Even though it’s never fun to be sick, knowing this might help us understand why it happens!
As reported by the huffpost.com, two Dutch researchers named this situation as ‘leisure sickness’ where a person falls sick during holidays when going for a leisure trip over the weekend. They also discovered that 3.6% of the physically active men and 2.7% of women reported being service during a weekend and 3.2% of men and 3.2% of women during a vacation.
Two participants said that they have leisure sickness related to issues such as work pressure, traveling stress or work change; but that their body takes time to rest and then develops symptoms.
Is it really possible to actually get sick from built up stress when you slow down?
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s definitely false, I’ll just say it’s unproven, and what it needs, like any study, it needs duplication,” said Dr. Christopher Sanford, an associate professor of family medicine and global health at the University of Washington. Sanford has also produced the travel health podcast” Germ & Worm.”
That is why Sanford said that they are not enough studies to verify the existence of what people have termed as ‘leisure sicknesses. The studies need to be done in more extensive samples in various settings and also compared with data obtained when people are not so frequently moving around, as Sanford mentioned.
Although you would not visit a doctor when you are on a vacation and be told that you are ill from leisure sickness, there exist other different reasons why you may contract a disease every time you are on a vacation or stressed. Here’s what experts say:
“Most of us who work, are not good vacationers as we are good worker because most of the time we do work,” said Dr. David Spiegel, chief of the Stanford Center on Stress and Health in California and the founder of air sleep app Reveri.
Some folks deal with the anxiety by burying themselves in the work while other people’s deepest stressors like financial instability or job loss are directly related to their work output Spiegel explained.
This means that when you aren’t stuck at your desk for hours on the end and checking every email and answering every call and your mind easily spiral into the worst-case work scenarios.